Grave War Read online

  “We should move on,” I said, sloshing through the water toward the opening in the mostly missing wall.

  The agent searching for a pulse didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. After a moment, he nodded to Martinez as if confirming what I’d already said. The body was a corpse. In a case like this, the living were rescued. Bodies remained in place as evidence.

  Tem motioned for me, shooting suspicious glances up at the ceiling. Sections of it had already fallen, but others sagged and bowed, likely to collapse at any point. I didn’t need any more incentive, but hurried toward the former doorway. Without the ledger, time might get a little funny. Even if the ledger had survived the blast, would the magic that tied it to the doorway have still functioned without, well, a door?

  Once I passed through what had been a doorway, the water that had flooded the entry vanished. The floors of the VIP room had been rough hardwoods, but were now nothing more than ash. Visibility dropped, smoke filling the air. Thick, but not deadly. More like when a bonfire blows in your direction. If the VIP room had been a true room, I’d have likely needed to drop to my stomach and hope for a layer of air under the smoke. Instead this “room” had no ceiling, and the smoke still pouring off the burning tree dispersed at least a little as it filled an open sky.

  The air was hot, dry, like the fire had sapped every drop of moisture. Pieces of charred furniture littered the ground where it had been blasted backward during the explosion. The real hazards were the massive twisted and blackened branches that littered the ground. Some still burned; others had apparently already burned themselves out, making me wonder how much time had passed in this pocket of Faerie since the explosion. It had been maybe two hours in the mortal realm, but here enough time had passed that many of the fallen branches were nothing but husks of ash. There was no rubble here—with no ceiling to cave in and the room so massively large, the bomb hadn’t done much structural damage, unlike on the mortal side. But the massive limbs created an obstacle course.

  Tem doused any actively burning limbs as we passed them, but he didn’t linger on them, and many still glowed with burning embers. I understood why—we didn’t know where fae might be pinned under the huge branches and he didn’t want to drown them. Not that cooking under a fire sounded any better.

  Lea set to work clearing some of the larger branches, lifting limbs thicker around than my waist without effort. She seemed to be impervious to the angry orange embers. Nori flew over the branches, heading deeper into the room at a fast clip. Moor followed her, leaping nimbly over the burning branches. The witches and I were not nearly as fast. I wove around the largest branches, wary of the hotter patches, but I had to clamber over some. Several times I had to stop and brush burning embers from my pants and boots when I brushed against a charred branch that still burned under the blackened bark.

  Ash fell like snow all around me. There had been snow falling in the Bloom the last time I’d been here, but this was different. This wasn’t magic, or at least it wasn’t only magic. I held up my palm and caught one of the larger chunks floating about. The silvery pink petal still shimmered, even with its edges withered and charred. I glanced up. In the thick haze of smoke, the sky was absolutely filled with the drifting but charred petals of the amaranthine tree’s flowers.

  Ahead, I could make out the hazy shape of Tem, silhouetted against the fire still consuming the trunk of the tree. The hose had reached its limits, falling short by several yards. Tem’s deep voice cursed. Despite the fact that the fire had been raging long enough that the fallen branches had nearly burned themselves out, the fire along the trunk of the tree blazed hot. Tem opened the valve the way the firefighter had shown him and released a jet of water.

  My first instinct was to hold my breath; something about the fire made me doubt the water would work, but I hoped I was wrong. While the smoke was not too thick to breathe, it burned my lungs when I held it too long. I ducked down, sucking in cleaner air near the ground.

  “What is this place?” Martinez said from somewhere behind me, her voice breathy from either the smoke, the exertion of scrambling over burning branches, or simply awe.

  “Somewhere humans rarely see.” At least not without being changed by it in some way. The lucky ones only lost a little time to Faerie. The unlucky ones? Well, they likely ended up addicted to Faerie food, changelings, indebted to a fae, or enslaved in Faerie. Even just a pocket of Faerie wasn’t a particularly safe place for mortals. “Don’t eat anything. And if you hear music, don’t follow it.”

  Martinez gave me a strange look, which probably had to do with the fact that we were at the scene of a bombing and this place didn’t look exactly enchanting right now, but better safe than sorry.

  I glanced to where Tem was still dousing the flames. Were they getting any smaller? I couldn’t tell, but it didn’t look like it. Nori, Lea, and Moor had scattered. I couldn’t see them in the smoke, but I guessed they were searching for survivors. The land of the dead was thinner here; it did still exist—unlike in Faerie, where souls never moved on—but the realms only barely touched. Even still, I could feel the death around me. The grave essence was light, brushing barely there fingertips across my mind. I had a sense that the essence reached for me from several sources, but I couldn’t even tell the gender of the victims—the land of the dead simply wasn’t strong enough here for my grave witch abilities to discern much, not with my shields in place. Outside the bubble of Faerie, I’d struggled to ignore the dead I’d sensed, but here, I had to concentrate just to differentiate the thin traces of grave essence.

  There were a lot of victims. I wasn’t sure how many, but I was sure I sensed multiples. Maybe some could be recovered. Death wasn’t as permanent in Faerie as it was in the mortal realm. But we weren’t completely in Faerie right now, and in this space in between, the taint of the grave loomed. No soul collectors would come here, but the tie between body and soul was surely damaged. There was likely no helping those who had died in the explosion. But we could help the survivors, and that would be easier if there wasn’t a giant bonfire in the middle of the Bloom.

  “Can your people do anything to help put out the fire?” I asked, gesturing from Martinez to where Tem still held the huge fire hose.

  Martinez nodded and then looked at one of her people. The male witch she’d brought stepped forward. He must have attempted to reach the Aetheric plane—the source of magic—because shock registered over his face for a moment and his jaw fell open. The Aetheric plane did exist here, but only thinly and at a distance, much like the plane for the land of the dead. After a stunned moment, he reached down and twisted a ring on his finger. I could feel the raw Aetheric energy he’d stored there as he tapped it, then he held his hands out in front of him, channeling the energy between his palms. After a moment, an orb of floating water appeared in the space between his hands. It grew as he walked, though his progress was slow as his attention was divided between crafting his spell and scrambling over the charred branches. Once he stumbled, falling to one knee, and I was sure he’d lose the spell, but he maintained it, reclaiming his footing. By the time he’d made it the last yard to stand next to Tem, the orb of water was wider than he was. He threw his arms wide, and the orb hurtled toward the tree.

  I expected it to pop like a water balloon upon contact, but it instead spread as it reached the tree, thinning and elongating to wrap around the trunk. The fire hissed, and steam sizzled off the amorphous glob of water. The flames fizzled where the magic water touched them, dying out.

  Neat trick.

  The fire hose hadn’t made much of a dent, but the witch’s strange congealed water blob smothered the flames it covered. It was evaporating quickly, though. Tem seemed to notice, and focused his hose in the area with the water. Considering the magic involved, I wasn’t sure that would help, but after a moment, it appeared the hose fed the blob. The witch turned toward Tem, giving him an approving nod before tapping in
to his stored magic again and beginning to create a second orb.

  I had little magic that would be useful in fighting a fire, but I was a sensitive and I could see witch spells, pierce glamour, and sometimes even get a sense of fae magics. If the explosion had some magical components, or the fire was magical in nature, maybe I could get a sense of the cause and help unravel it.

  I cracked my shields. Not far, just enough that I could gaze across the planes. Beside me, I heard Martinez gasp as my eyes began to glow. With the face shield an inch in front of my nose, the green light from my eyes reflected off the plastic, blinding me to anything happening past the shield. I cursed under my breath and pushed the face shield up, out of the way. Smoke stung my eyes, but at least I could see.

  With the land of the dead being so thin here, and the Bloom already in ashes and cinders around me, there wasn’t much change to the scenery. Thin wisps of Aetheric energy swirled here and there, trailing bits of green, pink, blue, and yellow through the air, but even that was sparse and easy to ignore. Magic clung to Martinez, as well as to the two witches she’d brought with her, but underneath that, they glowed a pale yellow. Human souls. My team all glowed a faint silver, as they were fae. The soul light was harder to discern in a pocket of Faerie, but it was there, noticeable.

  The water spell the witch fighting the fire was using looked like a densely woven web of green Aetheric energy now that my shields were open. The spell clung to the tree, the fire eating away at the Aetheric energy as it evaporated the water binding the magic. The ABMU witch’s spell was the only magic I could see on the tree, and the fire didn’t change in my gravesight, which meant it wasn’t glamour—not that I’d been holding out hope for that chance. But just on the edge of my senses, I thought I could feel another magic.

  I wasn’t good at sensing fae magic. I’d only begun picking it up at all when my fae nature had emerged around the Blood Moon half a year ago, but the part of me that sensed magic had a hard time focusing on it. I turned away from the tree, trying to glance at the fire only from the corner of my eye. Yes. There. I could just, almost, see silver lines of magic snaking up the left side of the tree.

  “The fire is being fed by a spell,” I said, taking a step closer to the tree. I was still several yards farther away than Tem and the male witch, but the heat billowing off the fire was intense, even with the spells worked into my jacket.

  Lieutenant Martinez stepped closer to me, and I could see her frown through the plastic of her visor. “I’m not sensing anything we didn’t bring in here.”

  So she was a sensitive as well. Not all that surprising for an Anti-Black Magic Unit lieutenant. She likely wouldn’t be able to pick up this magic, though, unless she had some skeletons—okay, well, fae—in her genetic closet. Based on the color of her soul, I was guessing she was purely human.

  “It’s not witch magic,” I said, trying to get a better look at the spell, or at least the source of the spell, but every time I looked harder, the traces of magic slipped away.

  Martinez looked back at the other witch she’d brought with her. The woman was short, the heavy fire gear making her look a lot wider than she actually was. She carried an odd instrument in her hands. It looked like a huge brick of a tablet, but with multiple antennae and several protrusions that glowed with embedded magic.

  The woman looked up and shook her head at her lieutenant. “This thing started going haywire the moment we stepped into this room. It’s spitting out max-level readings for fae magic pretty much everywhere.”

  “That reads magic?” I asked, staring at the weird, half-tech, half-magic device the woman carried. I’d seen plenty of spellcheckers before, and I could sense at least one spellchecker worked into the machine. But spellcheckers gave an alert—typically by changing color—if a spell was malicious. They didn’t determine anything more specific about the magic, and I’d certainly never heard of one that could detect fae magic. In fact, I regularly snuck fae spells past spellcheckers. The fact that spellcheckers could only be cast to check very specific things and relay only the most basic information was why sensitives were so highly valued.

  “It’s experimental. We’re still working out the bugs,” Martinez said, climbing over a branch to move closer to her officer so she could glance at the display screen. She frowned at whatever reading it was spitting out. “That isn’t going to help much.” She turned back to me. “Where are you sensing the magic? Maybe we can isolate it if we have a better idea.”

  I tried to look at the tree again with only my peripheral vision, though it was hard to look and not look at the same time, especially since the fire was continuing to rage. The water witch’s original spell had already shattered, and his second spell was dissipating rapidly, despite the fact that he was reinforcing it with more magic and Tem was adding extra water from his hose. From the look of him, he didn’t have enough stored magic on him to form a third water bubble. He clearly was accustomed to grabbing the raw Aetheric energy he needed at will, and had minimal reserved backup magic stored.

  It took a moment for the spell I’d seen earlier to pop into focus again. I could just barely make it out if I didn’t look too hard, but when I let my gaze unfocus, I could see the white lines snaking through the fire, wrapping up the tree. The magic retreated from the witch’s water spell as the fire was smothered, but as soon as the water gave ground, the fae magic shoved forward, pushing the fire back into the vacated space. At this rate, the fire would never extinguish. At least not until the tree was little more than charred dust.

  But where was the spell fueling the fire tethered? Was it on the tree itself? I clambered over burning branches, circling the tree without getting any closer to the flames. I couldn’t get too close; the radiant heat blasting off the fire felt like an oven. Every few feet I had to stop and work on unfocusing to catch a glimpse of the spell again. As I rounded the back of the tree, I finally saw that the silver lines of fae magic snaked off the tree, down to the soil around the roots.

  “Can you direct your water spell this way?” I asked, gesturing toward the spot.

  The water witch’s spell was no larger than a pizza now, and sweat poured down the lines etching his face. He tore his gaze away from his spell long enough to look not at me, but at his boss, who had followed me as I searched for the fire’s source. Martinez gave a nod of approval, and the witch flared his fingers. He’d positively glowed with magic when we’d walked into the Bloom. In the last few minutes, he’d depleted his stored magic and apparently cannibalized his charms for traces of Aetheric energy, because they were all dark and dormant now. Even the spell in his fire jacket—which wasn’t even his charm—had been drained. He used the little he had left to direct the rapidly shrinking water spell toward the spot I’d indicated. I hoped I was right about this, because if I wasn’t, this witch was tapped out and wouldn’t be doing anything else.

  The water spell was barely the size of a dinner plate by the time it reached the area where the fire spell originated. With the witch’s spell so small now, placement needed to be fairly precise if we were going to neutralize the fire. Not an easy feat as I could only focus on the magic by not focusing on it.

  “Left and down,” I said, frowning as I lost sight of the white lines of magic again.

  The water spell sloshed into the spot that seemed to have been glowing the brightest when I had been able to see it. The fire there sputtered, crackled, and then abruptly died down. I tried to see the fae magic again, to see if anything changed, but I couldn’t catch it. Was I trying too hard or . . .

  Tem’s fire hose was still drenching the trunk of the tree, and the fire sizzled and then suddenly snuffed out all along the wet base. Tem blinked in surprise, then repositioned the hose, spraying more of the tree. The fire, which hadn’t responded to the water at all a moment before, died out.

  “Lea, take over here,” Tem called out, and the other troll ran toward him, knocking aside the hea
vy branches as she bustled through them. She reached Tem, and then seemed to be at a loss at what to do with the unconscious fae in her arms, whom she must have extracted from the debris. After only a brief hesitation, she slung him over her shoulder and accepted the hose. The force of the water seemed to surprise her for a moment, causing her to take a step back, but then she braced her legs and took control, spraying the water higher up the tree, soaking the still-burning branches.

  “Where was the fire spell?” Tem asked, running to where I was standing.

  I opened my mouth to tell him it had been directly under where the witch’s spell was now, but while I could still see the web of glowing green magic, no larger than my palm, it likely looked like nothing more than one more puddle to everyone else. And water was puddling everywhere around the amaranthine tree.

  “Here,” I said, rushing forward. Now that the fire was out in the bottom half of the tree, the air wasn’t quite as oppressive, but the charred tree still radiated heat. I pointed to the spot the witch’s spell covered, and could feel the heat pulsing up from the ground through my gloves.

  Tem shoved his hand into the water pooling at the base of the tree. I gasped, yelping out a warning about the heat. The troll didn’t pay me any mind, but fished around in the mud and soot.

  His hand squelched as he jerked it from the puddle, something faintly glowing clutched in his massive fist. The moment the object cleared the water, flames burst over Tem’s hand.

  “Shit!” Tem shook his arm, only succeeding in allowing the flames to travel up his sleeve. But he didn’t let go.

  Someone screamed. I cursed, stepping forward like I would do something. But what the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t summon a water spell like the ABMU witch had done.